Checking if a site is penalised by Google

Although Google’s Webmaster Tools lets you see if your site is penalised, getting this information from a piece of software is virtually impossible. Webmaster Tools also won’t show you the status of other sites, such as competitor sites, sites you’re linking to or sites that link to you. I was therefore delighted to stumble upon an article at SEO Blackhat showing how it could be done through Google’s PageRank checking mechanism.

The article is not exactly clear though. To clarify:

Firstly you need to build a script that can check PageRank – the site PageRankCode has a PHP script which is quite easy to use. There are also loads of samples available for other languages like C# or Perl – just Google it.

Once you’ve got that working, you then need to do a PageRank check for the domain you want to find out about, with the subdomain “hyves” in front of it. So if you’re wanting to check “widgets.com”, do a PageRank check for “hyves.widgets.com”. This should return one of three results:

• PageRank 7 – the domain you’re checking has no penalities or bans applied to it.
• PageRank 4 – the domain you’re checking has a penalty applied
• PageRank 0 – the domain you’re checking is banned.

I have yet to try this code, so please feel free to feed back in the comments below. Looking forward to playing with it next week!

Update: It appears that this method went obsolete just before I posted this entry. Unfortunately it no longer works.